Portable electronic devices, such as cellular telephones and personal digital assistants (PDA's) provide information to users through an increasing number of modalities, including graphical information displayed on display screens, sound played through speakers, and vibrations generated via vibratory components. In addition to display screens, visual information may be presented through lighting elements integrated into or underneath the surface of a device's housing. These lighting elements may include light emitting diodes (LED's), electro-luminescent (EL) panels, polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) light valves, or various other components. The lighting elements, in at least some instances, can be used to provide visual ring tone alerts, visual indications of amplitude and frequency of ambient noise, and/or visual indications of battery or signal strength.
With the ever increasing number of modalities, and the increasingly sophisticated forms of the modalities, the need to provide suitable controls to accommodate the updated or enhanced types of modes becomes more pronounced. In some instances new controls need to be implemented. In other instances, existing controls can be extended to accommodate the further functionality. However, regardless of the manner in which the controls are implemented, it may be desirable to be able to coordinate the presentation of the various modalities to the user. For example, it may be desirable to coordinate the visual display of information or lighting effects, with audible sounds produced via the speaker. Still further, it may be desirable to coordinate vibrations produced by vibratory components with one or both of the visual and the audible presentations.
One such method for managing the presentation of audio information has been through the use of files and or commands conforming to the musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) data format standard. Previously, the MIDI data format standard has been extended to accommodate vibrations produced by a vibratory component. MIDI has further previously supported show controls, which have been used to manage and control lighting effects. However, the use of show controls often involves cumbersome manual encoding of complex hexadecimal sequences. The hexadecimal control sequences then need to be embedded, often manually, into a MIDI sequence event listing at the desired location.
While user friendly visual editors exist for the creation and management of the audio portions of a MIDI data file, few, if any, editors provide for the convenient management of lighting information, with or without the usage of the existing show controls. Consequently, it would be beneficial to develop and/or incorporate a more user friendly manner, in which to manage lighting effects, including managing the coordination of the lighting effects with other forms of modalities.
The present inventors have recognized, that by mapping lighting effects to existing audio commands and including the mapped lighting effects in the form of existing audio commands in an audio file format, that the lighting effects can be created and managed in a manner which is similar to and/or consistent with the manner in which the audio controls are created and managed.